*Pre-requisite: Successful Completion of one of the following with a C or better: WRTG 104, WRTG 105, WRTG 105B, WRTG 105E
T/TH 2:00-3:15
Why take this course?
- You’re curious about how the human mind works
- You want to better understand your own writing process
Key skills you’ll gain
- Experience in scientific writing
- Experience presenting to a multidisciplinary audience of your peers to test and develop research
- The ability to use research to study your own processes
- The ability to identify gaps in our current scientific knowledge of writing and develop proposal to fill those gaps
Full course description
What goes on in writers minds when they write and in readers minds when they read? Can learning about what goes on in both writers and readers minds help writers make their writing more effective? In this coursewe will delve into the cognitive processes underlying writing and reading: how writers generate ideas, translate those ideas into words and sentences, organize those sentences into arguments, and do all of this while managing things like spelling and typing, and how readers actually interpret the message being conveyed by a piece of writing. Well also explore the extent to which research in cognitive science can inform what we do as writers by experimenting on ourselves with research-grounded strategies. Students will read and take responsibility for presenting work from cognitive scientists and composition theorists, and will work towards a final project in which they explore existing research on a topic of their choosing and propose either further research or applications of that research.